Wilfred

Lugnuts! Precious lugnuts!

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Fething Pats day.
Honestly, the whole world celebrates it. Why? Cos its a great excuse to get drunk..
No one remembers St Georges Day. Not even the English, and hes our fething patron saint! /despair

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That's your own fault for 800 years of imperialism


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I'm not certain Techbot was directly responsible for that. Probably heavily implicated in it, though.

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The quote is familiar to me but I can't think why. Something about stars?

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Arthur C Clarke short, I think. Can't rightly remember myself.

Hi Pyro.

Firstly, welcome back!

As you've probably gathered from the above posts, the game has changed a great deal in the last couple of years. No doubt you'll have picked some of that up while playing.

Most noticeably for Blasters, Defiance has been added. That's an inherent power that lets you activate your low-level powers even when stunned, held, or slept. Suddenly it became a necessity to take the two lowest powers from your primary (Flares and Fire Blast? I can't remember exactly :P) and slot the first power in your secondary (Ring of fire). That way even when out of the action, you can take down enemies. Awesomely good for soloing, and pretty handy in small teams too.

Depending on when you were last around, Enhancement Diversification happened; that made it less useful to slot more than three of any particular enhancement type in a given power. So, long gone are the days of six-slotting for damage. In practical terms, you'll probably need to slot endurance reductions in most of your powers to make up for no six-slotted stamina; recharges help too, as Hasten is mostly not going to be perma anymore. A good 'generic' slotting guide for blast powers is now Acc/Dam/Dam/Dam/End/Recharge, although obviously tweak this according to the power

The Inventions system is the other biggy. I'd advise, at level 39, that you ignore most of it for now. There's two major aspects to it. Standard invention enhancements work just like SO's, except you never outlevel them, and the bonus granted varies depending on the level of the enhancement. They can be pretty expensive, however, so depending on the state of your finances (and enhancements) you may want to stick with SO's until 50. There's nothing at all wrong with doing this; the game is, if anything, easier than it was a couple of years ago, so slotting with SO's makes for a very playable character, still. Plus, you can pick up some very cheap higher-level SO's at the Auction House.

The other aspect to Inventions is Sets. Sets are special invention enhancements which come as sets (generally sets of six, but some are 3, 4, or 5); slot several of the same set into a power and it'll grant you various bonuses (for example, defense increases, recovery increases, and so forth). That's what the enhancements with funny names in Shannon's post are; specific invention set enhancements. Invention sets can get very expensive very quickly, but since some of the enhancements enhance multiple aspects of a power, you can get some very good returns by thinking carefully about what to slot and where. There's some great guides to the invention system over on the US boards.

Good luck out there!

Someone finally finished reciting all the possible names for the forums. Now they're winking out, one by one.

Blackguard... I believe in the EU beta, I attempted to solo adamastor on a shockingly badly build MA/Regen... I died horribly but loads of people turned up to help and we took him down. BG was tanking for us, and I think afterwards invited me along to some cave mission, even though I was 10 levels or so below the rest of the team. Nice guy.

How would Rad/Ice fare? I'm thinking the quick-cycling ST attacks might be just the ticket, and the recharge debuff and slow effects seem more pronounced than with Psy.

Off the topic, the ninja topic change brought something to mind. I made chips last night by cutting them then rolling them in salt and flour before frying them, and hot damn they were tasty. The extra flour increases the amount of oil the chips can take on, though, so need to drain well. The chunkier the chips the better, also.

I've always found a lot of TV is rubbish. At least nowadays most of the sport has buggered off to Setanta or whatever. I guess it's taking a while to fill that void with anything of acceptable quality.

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American Tripe - NO Thanks.

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Aren't HBO giving us Flight of the Conchords? <3

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Everyone has a guilty pleasure or two.

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So you're saying... we need to round up everyone and send them to correctional facilities, right? Awesome. It'll be expensive, but I'll have the lads hire some vans and start doing the rounds.

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(Before anyone starts: Brawl is a set mule! I'll happilly trade 3 slots on a Blapper for a total of 35% S/L Defence, 21% E/N Defence, 28% Melee Defence, 20% Ranged Defence and 30% Resistance to S/L/E plus Aid Self! )

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Bah, some of us were 6-ing Brawl before IO's and sets came out.

Chaps, powe rin our house just tripped off, CoHUpdater is verifying. No idea how long that'll be, PC always takes ages ; might be best to expect the rubbish empath won't make it back in time!

Cool, but possibly for the English market here a little rebranding. I recommend 'Avacuppatea'

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...went out to a club last night...

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Me too, but someone had scared off all the baby seals. Rubbish.

I had it on a defender once. Truly awful without the damage. I dunno, could be OK...

Plus you could proc it out to the MAX, dude. Force feedback +recharge, Explosive strike chance for smashing, scirocco's dervish chance for lethal, and armageddon chance for fire. Heh.

Rare recipes are supposed to be hard to get hold of. The Invention system was brought in to give something to strive for after 50; cheapen it any and you've removed the point. The game has never been made harder to compensate the introduction of IO's, so it's not like they're necessary for the game mechanic to function.

My point is, making them any less ludicrously difficult to obtain would cheapen the point of having them. It's not just farmers who can afford them, but as you'd expect for the top-level item in the game, you have to work for them. Hard.

They're a natural extension of the blaster philosophy.

Blasters = high damage but very fragile, 'glass cannons'.

The blapper powers offer higher DPS, but at greatly increased risk. So it's up to the player how much risk is worth how much damage.

Works for me.

The community's made up of dribbling buffoons, everyone's permanently AFK, farming, badgehunting or all three, you turn your back for two seconds and someone's nobbled your inf and salvage and TP'd you into Lusca, and you need MORE reasons?

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Shannons advice to take Stealth to lower your threat level is certainly sound.

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Don't think that's quite what he's getting at

With heals, the trick is to aim for any heal set that's not as expensive as Numina's. Unless you're completely minted there's really not that much need for it, unless you can see it being played loads after 50. It just doesn't offer enough of an improvement to justify the vast expense, as Mother's Love says.

Concealment and medicine are both complete wastes of power choices; as Shannon rightly points out, a Celerity +stealth dropped into SS lowers your threat level more than stealth would. You'll want to leave SS running in combat to zip all over the place; nifty, as healing doesn't suppress movement.

Medicine is completely pointless; your three heals (if you skip Absorb Pain then we will take your defender away until you agree to be more responsible with it) offer more than enough healing power, and the emphasis skips at least partly towards your buffs in the later game anyway, so you'll find your heals used slightly less after about level 25.

If you want to run leadership toggles all the time, that's fine, but it's a heavy endurance drain.

Personally, I went with three travel pools on my empath (noob alert); SS for Hasten (VITAL) and stealth, Flight to keep away from melee-heavy nasties and for shard travel, and Leaping so I don't get held by AoE's every 3 seconds (after Acro+CJ it goes up to every 3.5 seconds; damnable sleep and stun). On top of that I grabbed Stamina, so I could actually run all that.

Empathy doesn't really need supplementation from pools to do what it does; aside from Hasten, everything else is garnish.

Final bit of advice; don't neglect your secondary. Take 2-3 solid attacks and a utility power, and slot them like you mean it.

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Now which of my Alts looks less bad?

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Is this a trick question?

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So what is the best way to get merits??

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Rock on down to NCSoft, find the GMs, and don't stop punching until they've added a hundred thousand merits to everything on your account.

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Didn't they change the EULA to stop people doing this?

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That robot thing is really amazing. Really impressive how it catches itself when they make it lose its balance.

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Impressive? Yes. But creepy as hell too, especially in connection with the sound it makes

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Agreed, it freaks me out a little. Although the spoof impressed me more.

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Gamestation in Castle Mall in Norwich had 3 or 4 copies of the GvE box on the shelf, along with all the guild wars games, Lineage 2, the starter packs for Guild Wars and L2, but no copy of Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa to round off my collection :<

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I'm not entirely convinced that they're not just left over from launch and never been sold

It's a shame that you've decided not to go with WP - it outperforms the other sets in a serious way, and would be the secondary of choice to hit 50 fast.

I'm not hugely up on the other secondaries; my 50 energy aura brute only blossomed very late, and for most of the game it took a force of will to log him in and play.

Inv used to have lots of holes in its defences, the very varied damage types in cov tended to shred my inv brute pretty quickly. May have changed with the Inv passive changes.

I found stone too slow for a brute; when your mez protection slows you to a crawl it's not inducive to carefree smashing.

I think, if you're definitely not going with WP, elec or shield would prove the least painful way of getting to 50. Shield, however, can't be coupled with SS, which is very smashsome.